Monday 31 December 2012

Celebrating our 1st year and our wonderful guest bloggers

Our first year at Picturebook Den has been very exciting thanks to the great blogs from my fellow team members, contributions from our guest bloggers and also the comments from you, our readers.

Alongside our dedicated Picturebook Den team, we invited a whole range of guest bloggers to add their take on anything relating to picture books. So if you have a  moment you might like to browse these by clicking on the links to their blogs, featuring advice and fascinating viewpoints on a variety of subjects.

There have been blogs about where ideas come from, about the process of writing a picture book, about editing and reading picture books and our favourite books.  We have heard from individual writers sharing their expertise and experience.

In this the final blog of 2012 I wanted to look back at the fascinating blogs our Guest Bloggers have written since we started, almost exactly a year ago at the very end of December 2011.

When we invited Julia Donaldson, Children's Laureate and author of The Gruffalo and so many other wonderful picture books, she talked about how she goes about dramatising picture books

Being truly international we had a guest blog from John Shelley  talking about illustrating picture books for Japan in a Yen for drawing

Other amazing illustrators also shared their approaches and thoughts on working on picture books -

- such as John Hamilton in A spontaneous reaction  


and Emmeline Pidgen in An illustrator's view


We heard about another area of picture book creation from designer and packager Tony Potter in Packagers, picture-books and pop-ups.    

and from Kath Jewitt an editor, writer and project manager  in her blog Let's get physical



Other bloggers talked about content and approach.

Hilary Robinson discussed  How to talk to children about death  in her insightful blog,



Penny Ives wrote about being a reading omnivore
Karen King told us about My too dangerous picture book



and  Wendy Meddour described how inspiration for picture books is not always soft and fluffy in   A little bit of trauma goes long way   


  Natascha Biebow  wrote about What motivates your characters an important ingredient in any picture book.

 



Alison Boyle discussed story themes in bee-rocracies and hierarchies

and she also wrote about Why we write



Joyce Dunbar showed how children's books are part of everything around us in Children's books and olympic ceremony
   
As you can see our Guest Bloggers covered a wide range of fascinating topics this year and I hope you will agree that they truly complemented the wide range of informative blogs from our own team.

In 2013 we  will be bringing you many new thoughts on all aspects of picture books and we have some great guest bloggers lined up too.

Why not leave a comment and tell us what your favourite Picture Book Den Blog was this year and if there is anything you would like to hear about in the coming months.

But for now on behalf of all of us here on PICTUREBOOK DEN 

I wish you a happy healthy and successful year ahead in 2013



-----------------------------------------------------------------------------



Website   www.lindastrachan.com
Blog BOOKWORDS
Linda Strachan is the award winning author of over 60 books for all ages, from picture books to teen novels, and writing handbook Writing For Children



3 comments:

Moira Butterfield said...

It's been a truly interesting year on Picture book Den. The variety of content reflects what a rich and in-depth area it is and it's live and kicking.

Jane Clarke said...

Thanks for summing it up so brilliantly, Linda. It's been great to be part of the Den's first year. Wishing all our readers the very best for 2013 - Happy New Year!

Lynne Garner said...

What a great post. Firstly can't believe it's been a year since our first post and secondly wow we've had some great guests! Looking forward to another year of all things that are the Picture Book Den.